OSCILLATOR FEEDBACK

A couple of days ago I suggested that if you’re crafting more aggressive sounds, you probably don’t want to start with a sine wave. With Operator however, there’s an exception to this that involves the use of oscillator feedback. Essentially, this feature allows an oscillator to modulate itself – with some very interesting results.

If you start out with Operator in it’s default state and highlight oscillator A, you’ll see the Feedback parameter grayed out:

Feedback is only available for oscillators that aren’t being modulated by another oscillator. This means you’ll need to select a different algorithm:

This one sends all four oscillators to the output in parallel, so with this one you could use oscillator feedback on every oscillator if you wanted:

Now, you’ll see that Feedback has been activated for oscillator A:

Crank it up and you’ll hear the sine wave slowly become more sawtooth like. Once you go past 70% things start to get really strange and noisy .

Alright, that’s all for today. Tomorrow we’ll look at a fun way to put this into practice.